The whole board, one screen

I have spent most of a day measuring one number: how far down the screen your first card sits on a phone. Every decision below was made against it.

It was 627 pixels. It is now 518, and if you press the new button in the corner it is 420.

Picking up a card used to cost you the hand

The worse number was the one nobody was watching. The moment you select a card, the Counter of Fates fills with the arithmetic of the play, and the board grew by 115 pixels to make room. That is the state you actually play in, because nobody invokes without selecting first, and it was pushing the hand out of reach exactly when you needed to see it.

It costs 14 now. What pays for it is the panel you are not reading: while you are choosing, the Woken sheds its portrait and its twelve marks and becomes its name, its Dominion and its Strike, which is all of it your decision is made of.

Nothing is lost while the rest is hidden. Every card in your hand already wears its own chain or egg when its Force is bound, and the Counter of Fates states bound or banked for exactly the Forces you have selected.

Focus

There is a small square at the top right of the masthead. Press it and the masthead goes: the menu, the wordmark, the room sigil, the narration line. The button stays where it was, in the same corner, so there is always a way back, and the Turn Log moves to a quiet line beneath Invoke.

The board remembers your choice, the way it remembers your skin.

An illegal selection is now said on the cards

You can pick up two cards that cannot be played together. You always could on the server, which refuses the play and says why, but the board used to explain it in a line at the foot of a panel a few hundred pixels below where you were looking. The cards themselves ring red now.

They stay selected. The board does not decide what you may ask for; it only tells you what the answer will be.

Smaller things

The Gathering and the Grave say where they will land if you make this play, beside the count they are at. A Dream draw of five reads 32 to 27 before you commit to it.

Every named place has a drawing now. A star fort for the Redoubt, an abacus for the Counter of Fates, a fool for the Waker’s Folly, a tentacled head for the Pantheon, and three of the Unbound for the Gathering, who are people and were being drawn as a stack of cards. Your Bloodstones wear their cut: a round brilliant for ten, a trillion for fifteen, a step cut for twenty.

And the meters spell Dominion and Strike out again. They had been cut to three letters when the bars were squeezed into a column beside the card. The bars run the panel’s width now, so the words fit.